Because auroras never cease to amaze us, let's do a #TBT with @ajonsaas to when he took this captivating image in 🇳🇴⠀⠀⠀
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Tusen takk for tagging it with #yourESA , Aleck!⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
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🌠 Follow the link in our bio to dance like the auroras to the rhythms chosen by @thom_astro in his @spotify playlist, and don't forget to tag your @instagram stories with #yourESA for a chance to be featured!

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, Hubble, HLA;Processing & Copyright: Domingo Pestana
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Spiral Galaxy NGC 4038 in Collision
This galaxy is having a bad millennium. In fact, the past 100 million years haven't been so good, and probably the next billion or so will be quite tumultuous. Visible toward the lower right, NGC 4038 used to be a normal spiral galaxy, minding its own business, until NGC 4039, to its upper left, crashed into it. The evolving wreckage, known famously asthe Antennae, is featured here. As gravity restructures each galaxy, clouds of gas slam into each other, bright blue knots of stars form, massive stars form and explode, and brown filaments of dust are strewn about. Eventually the two galaxies will converge into one larger spiral galaxy. Such collisions are not unusual, and even our own Milky Way Galaxy has undergone several in the past and is predicted to collide with our neighboring Andromeda Galaxy in a few billion years. The frames that compose this image were taken by the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope by professional astronomers to better understand galaxy collisions. These frames -- and many other deep space images from Hubble -- have since been made public, allowing interested amateurs to download and process them into, for example, this visually stunning composite.
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#space#astrology#amazing#beautiful#instagram#crazy#badsciencejoke#cosmos#prespective#badsciencejokes#science#asapscience#telescope#light#celestron#nature#nasa#photography#astrophotography#astrophotographers#astrophoto#youresa#likeabos#woah#fact#facts#lit#cool#galaxy#collide

Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA
Text: European Space Agency
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Hubble Catches a Spiral Galaxy in Disguise
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Resembling a wizard’s staff set aglow, NGC 1032 cleaves the quiet darkness of space in two in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.
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NGC 1032 is located about a hundred million light-years away in the constellation Cetus (the Sea Monster). Although beautiful, this image perhaps does not do justice to the galaxy’s true aesthetic appeal: NGC 1032 is actually a spectacular spiral galaxy, but from Earth, the galaxy’s vast disk of gas, dust and stars is seen nearly edge-on.
A handful of other galaxies can be seen lurking in the background, scattered around the narrow strip of NGC 1032. Many are oriented face-on or at tilted angles, showing off their glamorous spiral arms and bright cores. Such orientations provide a wealth of detail about the arms and their nuclei, but fully understanding a galaxy’s three-dimensional structure also requires an edge-on view. This gives astronomers an overall idea of how stars are distributed throughout the galaxy and allows them to measure the 'height' of the disk and the bright star-studded core.
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#space#astrology#amazing#beautiful#instagram#crazy#badsciencejoke#cosmos#prespective#badsciencejokes#science#asapscience#telescope#light#celestron#nature#nasa#photography#astrophotography#astrophotographers#astrophoto#youresa#likeabos#woah#fact#facts#lit#cool#galaxy#spiral

Image Copyright: Yuri Beletsky
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Milky Way vs Airglow Australis
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Captured last week after sunset on a Chilean autumn night, an exceptional airglow floods this allsky view from Las Campanas Observatory. The airglow was so intense it diminished parts of the Milky Way as it arced horizon to horizon above the high Atacama desert. Originating at an altitude similar to aurorae, the luminous airglow is due to chemiluminescence, the production of light through chemical excitation. Commonly recorded in color by sensitive digital cameras, the airglow emission here is fiery in appearance. It is predominately from atmospheric oxygen atoms at extremely low densities and has often been present during southern hemisphere nights over the last few years. Like the Milky Way, on that dark night the strong airglow was very visible to the eye, but seen without color. Jupiter is brightest celestial beacon though, standing opposite the Sun and near the central bulge of the Milky Way rising above the eastern (top) horizon. The Large and Small Magellanic clouds both shine through the airglow to the lower left of the galactic plane, toward the southern horizon.
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#space#astrology#amazing#beautiful#instagram#crazy#badsciencejoke#cosmos#prespective#badsciencejokes#science#asapscience#telescope#light#celestron#nature#nasa#photography#astrophotography#astrophotographers#astrophoto#youresa#likeabos#woah#fact#facts#lit#cool#galaxy#milkyway

Image Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Gerald Eichstäd/Seán Doran
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Jupiter: A New Perspective
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This extraordinary view of Jupiter was captured by NASA’s Juno spacecraft on the outbound leg of its 12th close flyby of the gas giant planet.
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This new perspective of Jupiter from the south makes the Great Red Spot appear as though it is in northern territory. This view is unique to Juno and demonstrates how different our view is when we step off the Earth and experience the true nature of our three-dimensional universe.
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Juno took the images used to produce this color-enhanced image on April 1 between 3:04 a.m. PDT (6:04 a.m. EDT) and 3:36 a.m. PDT (6:36 a.m. EDT). At the time the images were taken, the spacecraft was between 10,768 miles (17,329 kilometers) to 42,849 miles (68,959 kilometers) from the tops of the clouds of the planet at a southern latitude spanning 34.01 to 71.43 degrees.
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Citizen scientists Gerald Eichstädt and Seán Doran created this image using data from the spacecraft’s JunoCam imager. The view is a composite of several separate JunoCam images that were re-projected, blended, and healed.
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#space#astrology#amazing#beautiful#instagram#crazy#badsciencejoke#cosmos#prespective#badsciencejokes#science#asapscience#telescope#light#celestron#nature#nasa#photography#astrophotography#astrophotographers#astrophoto#youresa#likeabos#woah#fact#facts#lit#cool#planet#jupiter

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/DLR
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Europa by the Numbers
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Galileo Galilei discovered Jupiter's moonEuropa in 1610. More than four centuries later, astronomers are still making discoveries about its icy surface. With a diameter of almost 2,000 miles, an orbit equivalent to 3.5 Earth days and a mass about 65 percent of Earth's Moon, Europa is considered by some scientists a likely place to look for present-day environments suitable for life.
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Europa’s water-ice surface is crisscrossed by long, linear fractures. Like our planet, Europa is thought to have an iron core, a rocky mantle and an ocean of salty water. Unlike Earth, however, Europa’s ocean lies below a shell of ice probably 10 to 15 miles thick and has an estimated depth of 40 to 100 miles. The latest analysis Europa make this Jovian moon one of the most promising places in the solar system to search for life. Europa has long been a high priority for exploration because beneath its icy crust lies a salty, liquid water ocean. NASA’s Europa Clipper, targeted to launch in 2022, will be equipped with the instruments necessary to determine whether Europa possesses the ingredients necessary to support life as we know it.
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This image shows two views of the trailing hemisphere of Europa. The left image shows the approximate natural color appearance of Europa. The image on the right is a false-color composite version combining violet, green and infrared images to enhance color differences in the predominantly water-ice crust of Europa.
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#space#astrology#amazing#beautiful#instagram#crazy#badsciencejoke#cosmos#prespective#badsciencejokes#science#asapscience#telescope#light#celestron#nature#nasa#photography#astrophotography#astrophotographers#astrophoto#youresa#likeabos#woah#fact#facts#lit#cool#europa#europe

Happy Space Art Wednesday!⠀⠀
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Today @iremgunes1 from 🇹🇷, takes us to explore the universe with @caninelli in this oil painting.⠀⠀
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Teşekkür ederim for sharing this lovely artwork with @yourESA community, Can!⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
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🎨 Every Wednesday we take a look at the most talented artists of our community and share their space-inspired works.⠀⠀⠀
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If you like to express your love of space painting, designing, cooking, with music, videos... tag us on @instagram with #yourESA for a chance to be featured!

The Jellyfish Nebula in an ocean of gas.
This one was fun as always. I tried to bring out the Oiii the best I could in this image, but it was just so darn sparse in the nebula that it made it difficult to make the blue really pop. Now I see why my friend Andrew (@ak_astro) was having issue with it! Regardless it was still fun and I even attempted to go with a minimalistic noise reduction approach to see how it would turn out. It's a bit noisier than I am used to and I don't think I will skip NR so much again, but it was still fun to experiment.
Thanks for looking!